Intellisites, the smart choice for web design

Some people actually spend a lot of time scoping the internet for free stuff.  And there’s plenty of it out there. With its coupons and free samples and freeware, the internet can provide hours of entertainment for people looking for complimentary goodies.

Everybody Else is Doing It…

One way to increase traffic to your site and make your email list grow is to join the crowd and offer something for free. If it’s something super cool, the freebie alone might be enough to lure people to your site. A really cool screensaver or some wallpaper, for instance, can attract a party if it’s unique enough.

If you can’t come up with something earth-shattering, there’s nothing wrong with something tried and true. Good content packaged in a list or an e-book might not cause a mad rush to your website, but it may help you to collect the email addresses of people who do visit. If you have information and visitors to your site need it, volunteering their email addresses is usually no big deal. (Just make sure not to collect that email address as part of a complicated 28-question form…you want them to get what they want without feeling hassled.)

Look at it this way…people go to the trouble of taking cars and cabs and buses to go places that offer free stuff or even discounts…and they can visit websites that do the same without even leaving the comfort of their homes.  If you were doing some online browsing, wouldn’t you appreciate getting something for free?

Is anybody actually visiting my website?

That’s a question that a lot of people ask themselves.  After slaving away to keep their sites polished and updated, business owners want to be able to see whether their site is actually working for them.

So what’s the best way to do this?  Look at your analytics.

Through Google analytics, you can find out not only whether your site is getting visited, but a boatload of details about who is visiting it and what they’re doing there.  It’s kind of like 24:7 video surveillance on a store – except it’s on a website.

In some ways, Google analytics are even better than constant video footage would be.  For example, you get to find out how visitors ended up at your site.  In other words, what did people type into Google that made your site pop up?  That’s really important information from a search engine optimization standpoint, so that’s an awesome feature of Google analytics.

You can also use Google analytics to determine your site’s bounce rate.  A bounce rate basically shows whether people who visited the site peaced out right away or spent some time clicking around to different pages.  Your goal is to have a site with a low bounce rate, which would indicate that your home page is enticing people to delve deeper into your site.

And that info is just the beginning.  Do you want to know the average time your visitors spend on your site?  Do you want a map of what areas of the world your visitors live in?  Are you interested in how many new visitors vs. how many returning visitors?  Do you want to compare your traffic from one day to the next?  Google can hook you up with all of this information, and more.

Of course, the benefit of a store’s video surveillance system is that it can be used to see people’s faces (well, at least a grainy version of them).  So while you can actually see who visits a brick and mortar store through its video security system, you cannot see a picture of exactly who visited your website through Google analytics…

…yet.

We’ve developed over 500 web sites in the last eight years, for all kinds of businesses and organizations.  Big companies, little companies, florists, lawyers, politicians, tattoo parlors, retailers… you name it – a real eclectic mix.  There’s a real common thread between them – they all think they can write.

Some of them are right – they really CAN write.

And some of them really CANNOT.

They also have another thing in common – each client has spent a lot of time with us on the design.   We’ll go over usability, navigation, colors, pictures, ‘calls to action’ buttons, you name it.  They get that.

But when it comes to adding content to the design, a typical response is:  “My friend, I’ve been writing since elementary school.   I’ll write it.”  Or, “we’ll just throw in a few bullet points and be done with it.  Or my favorite:  “we’ll just ‘borrow ideas’ from another site”  (you guessed it – that was a politician.  Not an original bone in their creative minds).

Get this – relevant content on your site is king.  Don’t relegate it to court jester status.

What exactly is relevant content?

Your web site’s content is basically all the “stuff” on the site. All the words,  images and audio.  Everything that your viewers see, read, hear and experience is content and it’s extremely important to your site.

Good content rules.

The whole idea of the web is to make lots of information easily accessible to the world. The best way to make it work for you, is to fill your website with great content. The more relevant and interesting your web site’s content is to your target audience, the more it will resonate with them as potential customers.

To Google… and Beyond!

The better and original the content is, the better it will do with search engines, too. Search engines use special formulas called algorithms to comb through a web site’s content, looking for pages that match the search criteria. The more clear and relevant a pages’ content is to that search phrase, the higher up in the search engines’ results it should appear. And that’s money in the bank for you.  As your web site climbs higher on a search results page, the chances of it being clicked increase exponentially.

Here are a few guidelines to use when creating content for your site:

1. The information you post on your site needs to be useful, educational, informative, valuable or just plain entertaining.
2. Update your content regularly to gain an edge on your competition.
3. Know your target audience and what they want to read, hear, see or know.
4. If content is king, spelling and grammar are his crown and robe (ooh, that’s a good one!).
5. Paragraphs and sentences need to be brief. Blocks of text are intimidating to the reader.
6. Use lists, bullets and numbers (like these!) to better outline text; just don’t use it exclusively!
7. Make sure all of the content is relevant to your company’s identity.

This list should help you weed out the useless and inappropriate info that is clogging your site and holding it back from reaching its full potential. Because with too much of the wrong information, search engines will never find your site and customers will never want to visit it.

Just remember, when it comes to your web site – lots of content is great, but relevant always rules.  With an iron fist.

Until next week,

-Dave Borland